Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Sketches

I've been neglecting the blog the last few weeks!! Well here's a sketch dump!

Also I dropped in a few thoughts down below amongst the sketches about some recent struggles and just cathartic venting.

First some scanned sketches in pencil and marker (some with both).

Some rough concepts for a current commission - so much fun to work on these and it's a very cool project that I can't wait to see become reality.

And some rough doodles between work. I've been playing around with the way that I sketch digitally.

It's weird because I've always drawn primarily with pencil on paper when "drawing". I would shade and add value in my sketches but it always began with line. When I first got a tablet in 2007 - this method did not seem to work the same for me, or at least it just felt completely wrong. I basically put aside digital drawing and painting altogether for the next few years. I still used the tablet in my day to day work with graphic design but I never drew or painted with it. In fact I did not draw very much at all outside of work during that time - but that's another story entirely.

In late 2010 I began designing tshirts for my friends' bands. But they wanted illustrated designs. So I busted out the tablet and went to work. I wound up with the desired result, which was heavily cell shaded artwork, comic-book-esque artwork. A very cool look - but not really my natural way of drawing. It was just the tshirtification of what I knew about drawing and coloring. This was a way for me to draw with lines, then draw even more lines, and then color with lines as well. I don't know if that makes any sense, but everything was like a ink brush stroke (I work mainly with Manga Studio when doing that type of work). So that pushed me into a weird place with my relationship with digital painting - I was forced to work with lines. But this didn't really translate to the type of art I wanted to make.

Anyway, all of that is a long way of getting to my present struggle of finding a way of developing my images that both feels good and delivers a strong image. I still love to draw with lines (and when I say lines, I mean very tight line work that pretty much finalizes the drawing before any color hits the canvas). I don't know if that's really the way for me when it comes to digital painting. I also can't seem to be a total silhouette and shape guy either. It feels very foreign to me. I think the answer for me is just a happy medium of the two with perhaps a slight leaning towards lines at the very start, but quickly bouncing to adding in large value areas. So these 3 doodles from today were sort of experiments with my early sketch process. Mixed bag here - but they were fun.

Lastly, here is the line art to a fan piece of Dan Luvisis's Last Man Standing that I'm working on. I'm posting it to force myself to finish it. This character is Nikolai. The book is packed with unique, fun character designs so it was hard to choose just one. And Gabriel (the protagonist) is so freaking cool, it was hard not to want to draw him. So I just drew Gabriel helmets on a bunch of other sketches recently (including the latex lady in the image above this paragraph).